Steve Jobs proved his dark side powers by bringing Apple back from the dead -- a seemingly impossible feat. (Source: Fortune)

Clearly Jobs has little mercy for incompetence

Love him or hate him, you
have to admit Steve Jobs was responsible for almost single-handedly righting
the ship at Apple, Inc. (AAPL),
saving the company from bankruptcy. Thanks to a revitalized Mac lineup
and an armada of i-devices, Apple has surpassed Microsoft in profits and market
cap andgained
dominant positionsin a couple of critical sectors, including online music and
tablets.

So how did Mr. Jobs accomplish the seemingly
Herculean task of fixing the badly broken company? If a new report is to
be believed, the answer may be -- by acting as an exacting and unforgiving
"dictator".

It's little secret that working at Apple is one of
the toughest assignments one can take on professionally. ButFortune magazine's
Adam Lashinsky offers all the juicy details regarding why that is the case.

According to the report Jobs gives every incoming
vice president at the company a speech on why they cannot rely on
"excuses" and "reasons". He says these things are
important for hourly employees, but unacceptable for managers. Writes Mr.
Lashinsky:

Jobs imagines his garbage regularly not being emptied in his
office, and when he asks the janitor why, he gets an excuse: The locks have
been changed, and the janitor doesn’t have a key. This is an acceptable excuse
coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. The janitor gets to
explain why something went wrong. Senior people do not. "When you’re the
janitor," Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, "reasons
matter." He continues: "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO,
reasons stop mattering." That "Rubicon," he has said, “is
crossed when you become a VP."

And Mr. Jobs was true to his word -- he accepted
no excuses for poor performance. The story recalls thelaunch
of the iPhone 3G with MobileMein 2008. MobileMe was supposed to be a service
that synced your calendars and more to an online cloud for accessibility from
anywhere. But at launch the service proved ugly, marred by crashes and
bugs.

Mr. Jobs called an emergency Town Hall meeting
with all members of the MobileMe team. Outraged
at the problems, he complained that the MobileMe team was "tarnishing
Apple's reputation" and that they "should hate each other for having
let each other down." He added, "[The Wall Street Journal's
Walt] Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us."

Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, "So why the f***
doesn't it do that?"

Mr. Jobs then cleaned house, relieving all the
MobileMe managers of their duties and installing new managers on the spot.

In the kingdom of Jobs every Monday the chief
meets with executives to reviewevery important meeting. On Wednesday
the company holds its marketing and communications meetings.

At Apple those meetings represent the ying --
technical professionals -- and yang -- creative professionals. Apple
gives its creative professionals as much license as its technical
professionals, or more, in some cases. For example the head of Apple's
online content has no control over what images get posted to Apple's website --
that's almost entirely in the hands of the company's graphic artists.

And it offers those artists a virtual blank check
to "perfect" projects -- for example it hired Hollywood camera crews
to film a pair of fake weddings in Hawaii and San Francisco (the San Francisco
one used Apple employees as extras) for iMovie. The iMovie soundtracks
were contracted, at great expense, to the London Symphony Orchestra.

Despite the sometimes conflicting interests of the
technical and creative staff, there's seldom clashes, thanks to Apple's
carefully spelled out documents which detail the DRI ("directly
responsible individual") for every item in a project.

All of this precision gets back to Mr. Jobs.
Writes Mr. Lashinsky:

The creative process at Apple is one of constantly preparing
someone — be it one's boss, one’s boss’s boss, or oneself — for a presentation
to Jobs. He's a corporate dictator who makes every critical decision — and
oodles of seemingly noncritical calls too, from the design of the shuttle buses
that ferry employees to and from San Francisco to what food will be served in
the cafeteria.

Given Mr. Jobshealth
problems, their leader's eventual demise is a thought that has plagued many
at Apple.

Mr. Jobs, himself, reportedly handpicked the dean
of Yale's School of Management, Joel Podolny, to both head Apple University
(Apple's internal training programs), and lead a group of business professors
(many of whom were from Harvard) to collect case studies to be used after the
CEO's death. Mr. Job's goal is to make sure that even when he dies, that
he lives on in the company's leadership and management style.

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"I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired." -- North Korean Supreme Commander Kim Jong-il